In the manufacture of wire netting, such as welded square or diamond mesh, the netting is made in the form of long strips which are coiled up as it is made. These coils have a generally cylindrical shape and are usually packed for transport. The ends of the coil are rough and in most cases the ends of some of the wires forming the netting project from the ends of the coil. For this reason a protective paper or corrugated cardboard end cover is folded and fixed over each end to form a cap, and then the coil is wrapped. In other cases where very good protection is needed, the coils are packed in cylindrical or prismatic cardboard boxes.
As a result of modern methods of distribution and more efficient transport methods, the demands on transport packaging have increased constantly, but of course higher packaging costs increase the total cost of the product or decrease its margin of profit. For this reason a good quality and cheap packing method is of great importance, especially a method employing a minimum of labor. In recent times shrink plastic film packaging has been developed. In this method a film of shrink plastic such as polyethylene is laid loosely around the product whereafter the packed product is placed in an oven which causes the film to shrink and to tighten itself around the product. It is possible to make a loose packing in a simple machine and the shrinking leaves the product tightly packed.
When such shrink film packing is applied to coils of wire netting, it is still necessary to have a protective end cover on each end of the coil before it is placed in the packing machine, because the film upon shrinking and during further transport and handling would be perforated by the projecting wire ends at the ends of the coil. For this reason, a protective covering cap is fixed to each end and it is desirable that this be done using a minimum of labor excluding e.g. the need of making knots or other time consuming operations. Although the problem of cheaply fixing an end cover on the ends of a coil has grown in signifiance with the development of shrink film packing, it should be noted that this problem also exists in other methods of packing where the coil is tightly enclosed into a packing sheet, e.g. of paper, and that the invention is not limited to the shrink film packing method alone.
Viewed from one aspect, the invention provides a method of packing a wire netting coil, said method including laying over each end of the coil a protective end cover having at least one tongue hingedly connected thereto, said tongue or tongues being introduced into the coil as to enter into sufficiently total frictional and clamped relationship with the coil material as to keep the end cover in place, and subsequently tightly enclosing said coil with the thusly affixed end covers into a packing sheet.
Viewed from another aspect, the invention provides a packing for a wire netting coil, said packing including a sheet tightly enclosing said coil, and, on each end of said coil at the inside of said sheet, a protective end cover having at least one tongue hingedly connected thereto and entering the coil, the tongue or tongues being in sufficient total frictional and clamped relationship with the coil material to keep alone the end covers in place.
In order that the covers may be attached to the coil by a quick, simple method, the tongues are arranged so that they may be pushed into the coil to be held there between the layers of network or in the meshes or in the hollow core of the coil. Such covers are not difficult to make, and it is preferred to form the tongues simply by cutting them from the cover over a part of the circumference of the tongue, in such a way that it can be folded over into said coil over the remaining part of said circumference. This cutting step can readily be performed when the cover itself is being cut from a sheet of material, and folding occurs during the introduction of the tongues into the coil.
In general a wire netting coil has a hollow core, and in this case the end cover sheet is preferably a substantially circular flat disk having two opposite radially extending tongues extending from the circumference of the disk to the circumference of a concentric circle having substantially the diameter of said hollow core. The tongues are folded over transverse to the plane of the disk and along said circumference of said concentric circle, introduced into the core to such a depth that the disk abuts the end of the coil, and then released so that the tongues push against the inner surface of the core. To this end, the material of the disk in the region of the fold has sufficient resilience to push both tongues against the inner surface of the hollow core to keep the disk in place.